Engage in technical discussions keeping in mind the OpenStack promise

When OpenStack launched, it made four clear promises to its community: Open Source, Open Design, Open Development and Open Community. Open Source for OpenStack founders has been clearly explained:

We are committed to creating truly open source software that is usable and scalable. Truly open source software is not feature or performance limited and is not crippled. There will be no “Enterprise Edition”.

I find it worth restating that promise because I believe the four ‘Open’ promises that largely contributed in boosting OpenStack growth. There is a conversation about what is Cinder itself and what’s the role of its drivers. It’s a highly technical debate and a very important one, where I think this promise needs to be reminded: There will be no “Enterprise Edition”.

I won’t enter into technical details because it’s not my role. John Griffith and Ken Hui have a lot of interesting things to say about this and I suggest you to read their posts. My personal opinion based on what I heard in Atlanta and read afterwards is that one approach puts Cinder in danger of becoming only useful if you pay a license to someone offering “value added” (better, freedom removed) pieces of hardware and software. That would be very shortsighted and that’s not what OpenStack is. I think any leader of OpenStack has to be very careful when implementing changes that may put OpenStack’s promises in danger. The promises we made as a community are the first things to keep in mind during any conversation, technical ones included.